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Friday, March 27, 2015

POV ("point of view") is a series that addresses many of the same themes covered in my Equals Record column: growing up, saying yes to adventure, learning to embrace a quarter-life crisis. While my previous column focused largely on ideas, POV focuses on moments - glimpses, glances, tiny stories.

I spent Wednesday — the last day of a
spontaneous week-and-a-half getaway to Los Angeles — in the heat of an
80-degree March afternoon, barefoot, in front of a tinsel-likestretch of the Pacific Ocean.

My nephew, Dash, newly turned two, squatted in the
sand beside me, eyes fixed on a bird wetting its wings in the surf. “Bird,” he
said, blinking with such force that his lashes, straight as
sticks, created shadows down his cheeks. Then, noticing the distant hum of an
engine overhead, he looked up, pointing at a cottony stream of clouds left in
the wake of passing plane. “Plane,” he said.

“Dash,” said my brother, Max, “tomorrow, Shoko’s
going to be on an airplane.”

Dash shoveled sand into a Smurf-blue plastic mold
of a castle.

“The next time we talk, I’ll be in New York,” I
said. “In the apartment I showed you on the phone, with the bus stop outside
and the train going over the bridge.” I paused. “Beach today, city tomorrow
— isn’t that crazy?”

He turned the mold upside down, revealing the
crumbling architecture beneath it, mouth open as the turrets fell.
Then, already at work building the next one, he answered me flatly, with what’s
become his most-used (and most useful) word as of late: “yup.”

--

A day earlier, I met a friend who’d recently moved
from Brooklyn to LA at a grassy, hidden park tucked away in the hills. I
brought coffee and a bacon quiche I’d found at a bakery nearby, and we sat for
an hour on knit blankets on the lawn, inching them into the shade every few
minutes as the sun rose higher.

We discovered, with shock, that six months had
passed since we’d last seen each other. It was fall then, and I’d run into him
sitting on a Williamsburg stoop late at night in velvet slides and a sweater.
Now, here we were in LA, eating breakfast in burning sunlight, our toes in the
grass.

I listened as he told me about the art he’d been
working on, the community he’d found, the new friends he’d made. I remembered back
to when he broke the news to me that he was leaving New York,
ready to move, ready for something new.

“Six months have passed, and you have a whole
new life,” I said. “How did that happen?”

He shrugged, shooing ants from the ruins of our
quiche. “I asked for it,” he said.

--

I told someone recently that my twenties (which are
soon coming to an end) have been defined by a rapid-fire change of
scenery, some of it planned, some of it not. It’s a bit of a head trip to think
back on the many worlds I’ve inhabited over the course of that time — and
the many I hope to find myself inhabiting in the future. But for
the most part, the discombobulation has been a thrill — similar, I
imagine, to the way Dash finds dizziness electrifying after being spun in
circles, and begs for more after he’s staggered left and right, then fallen.

On the plane back to New York, I sat curled in my seat, half asleep as the sky changed from blue to gray to blue again. I
was listening to a song I love, and, barely conscious, waited for
a familiar, favorite chord. The moment I heard it, the plane tilted slightly to
one side, so that the ground disappeared and all that was visible was a sea of
white.

It seemed perfectly timed, like music, and for a
moment I considered the idea of the planet turning to an undetectable beat.

The plane shook. Behind me came a woman’s
voice: “What’s happening?”

“It’s nothing,” said her companion. I imagined him
looking at her, touching her arm, waving a hand in the direction of the window.
“It’s only clouds.”

--

You can find my previous POV entries, here. Thank you so much for your support, as always. Photo via my Instagram.

I am so new to this space, to you and your words, yet the way in which you invite your readers in - through the snippets of moments across days, through time, conversationally - makes me feel as though I've been visiting for a lot longer. It's an honour, Sho, to feel this way - to feel like I'm catching up with a friend, to feel like I'm witnessing a life alongside my own, yet from across a big, wide, and deep ocean. I'm so thankful <3